Saturday, December 01, 2012

R project - R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms, Windows and MacOS.R Studio - RStudio IDE is a powerful and productive user interface for R. It’s free and open source, and works great on Windows, Mac, and Linux.R Cookbook - Download link to an introductory book to learning R.R Tutorial Blog - A blog with lots of R tutorials.Coursera's R course - Recorded R lessons from Coursera on youtube.R Intro Book - Another great introductory pdf book on R.Codecademy - Codecademy is the easiest way to learn to code. It's interactive, fun, and you can do it with your friends. They have interactive tutorials on Javascript, HTML/CSS, Python, and Ruby.

Friday, November 30, 2012

Over the years many discretionary traders have moved on to other jobs. Today's traders have evolved into trading from a more quantitative/automated approach. Trading volume the last 3 years has been decreasing and the ability to scalp the emini's has been increasingly difficult for discretionary traders. I was checking out my old but popular Trading Blogs list and found that most of the blogs have vanished or the authors stopped posting around 2009. I would like to link some new interesting blogs and trading related websites that I checkout frequently.

ZeroHedge - The main author who calls himself by the popular fictitious movie character; "Tyler Durden", from the movie Fight Club, and various other authors report the news. They also have a separate live news reporting broadcast(Talking Forex). They report some good information, but take everything they write with a grain of salt and try not turning into a doom and gloom fan or gold bug.

Scarr Visual Trading - Spread charts, some free, most for a subscription. The ability to compare up to 5 years at a time on a spread from one year vs another is nice. Now if only someone made a website with historical term structure charts going back 10 years.

Quantpedia - A new website made from the guys at FinFiz that provides proven trading strategies (mostly taken from white papers) and lets you decide which one to trade, with a subscription of course. Not that expensive if you consider the alternatives to spending hours scouring finance journals, algotradinggroup forum or SSRN.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

When traders consider futures trading platforms they choose
those platforms that have the technical specs, the visual appeal and the
stability required in aggregating large files of data. However, traders should
also consider two aspects when it comes to trading futures:

1)Low latency delivery of trades. In the exchanges
where institutions compare nano seconds, you should consider data feeds that
would deliver your trade as fast as possible. Keep in mind, in the exchange it’s first in and first out,
so the idea of you being a head in your trading execution is important.

2)Unfiltered data. You can only develop a good
methodology if you have all facts so having an unfiltered data will give you a
complete picture of what is happening in the market place. Many use aggregate data
that simply can skew data that chart traders rely on.

One such data that feed you will
find appealing is Rithmic

Rithmic advantages include:

Unfiltered
data: During volatile
periods you get an accurate picture of price activity, because Rithmic
provides a very stable data feed. You will actually see true
“tick-by-tick” data instead of “data blocks” like most other data
providers. You get a clear and instantaneous picture of price activity.

Rithmic’s
servers are co-located
right on the major exchanges and provide high-end stable connectivity and
smart order routing solution that can meet the demands of the most
demanding retail traders.

Stability:
Rithmic’s
infrastructure sits atop the most sophisticated and highly reliable
infrastructure and is monitored at all times by top quality programmers